My postgraduate training was rather narrowly focused on synthetic organic chemistry, but in my 20 years as a science editor, I’ve often been called upon to edit material outside this specific area of expertise. As a result, I’ve learned a lot about, for example, environmental chemistry and materials science simply by frequently editing papers in those fields. However, the relatively recent advent of podcasts, MOOCs (massively open online courses), and webcasts has allowed me to more systematically expand my knowledge of, and keep current in, other areas of interest to me—such as nanotechnology, bioinformatics, biochemistry/chemical biology, cell biology, immunology, virology, and statistics. By familiarizing myself with the basic concepts and standard terminology in these fields, I’ve been able to speed up my editing, ask more-informed questions, and provide more value to my clients.